Theodore Harold Maiman's ruby laser was the first working laser, demonstrated in May, 1960. It emitted pulsating bursts of light. His laser consisted of a synthetic ruby rod containing chromium atoms. Pulses from a photographer's flash lamp excited the atoms, creating pulsating bursts of red laser light.

The second working laser was Ali Javan's helium-neon laser, the first gas laser, demonstrated later that year. It converted electrical energy to a laser light and generated a continuous light beam instead of pulsating bursts of light. Javan's gas laser apparatus had an 80-centimeter-long quartz tube with an inner diameter of 1.5 centimeters. This tube contained a mixture of the inert gases helium and neon, and there were two internal electrodes used to send an electric current through the gas mixture. On both ends of the tube were reflecting and parallel mirrors.

Because inert gases do not easily combine with each other to form molecules, it was possible to isolate the atomic transfer of energy that is used at the first stage of the process, when the electrodes excited the atoms of helium gas with a current. The process began with the electric current stored as an internal energy in an energetic state of helium atoms, which then excited the neon atoms, whose atomic transitions produced the laser light. This light was then bounced between the mirrors and became rapidly amplified, increasing in intensity until a light beam was output from the apparatus. The mirrors could also be used to control the wavelength of the light. The power was low but very constant in this kind of laser, referred to as a continuous-wave laser. The output of Javan's gas laser was near infrared.

In 1962, researchers Alan D. White and J. Dane Rigden created a version of the laser that generated a visible red beam, the now standard 632.8-nanometer (nm) red line. In the mid-1970's, the gas laser was the first laser to be mass-produced, for use in Universal Product Code (UPC) scanners. It also became useful in holography, communications, information handling, construction alignment, surveying, medical technology, and laboratory demonstrations. Up until the late 1990's, the red helium-neon laser was the most common and profitable laser for low-power applications, since it was inexpensive to manufacture and provided a continuous, coherent low-power output at a visible wavelength.

With the invention of the helium-neon laser, Javan became an internationally acclaimed physicist and pioneer in laser technology. His gas laser was the first laser functioning on the principle of converting electrical energy to a laser light output. It was also the first to operate continuously--that is, to generate a continuous light beam. A significant scientific breakthrough, the gas laser became widely used in research and industrial laboratories, as well as practical applications such as Universal Product Code (UPC) scanners and holography.

It is significant that the day after its invention, the first experiment with a practical application for the gas laser involved a telephone call, because subsequent developments in fiber optics contributed to a revolution in communications, eventually forming the backbone of the Internet as well as telephony and media transmission. Javan's success with the gas laser helped to stimulate a wide range of future developments in laser research, including the use of other kinds of gases and materials such as semiconductor diodes to produce light.

Javan also directly contributed to the development of saturation spectroscopy, which made it possible to achieve unprecedented levels of precision in spectral analysis on the molecular and atomic levels. Ordinarily, lines of resolution at these levels are masked by thermal atomic motion, but the focused laser light can be used to eliminate the extra resonances caused by this motion.

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